“I’m not very good at hating things”: A Conversation with Elamin Abdelmahmoud

The writer and podcaster discusses his new book ‘Son of Elsewhere,’ taking pop culture seriously, and not inviting his Twitter self to the writing party.

On the cover of Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s first book, Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces, an illustrated highway curves past telephone lines and beckons the viewer into the distance. Tucked just to the right of the road, so understated you might miss it at first, is the City Hall building in Kingston, Ontario, where Abdelmahmoud moved from Sudan at age twelve. This juxtaposition—the road’s sprawling promise of adventure with the cheeky Easter egg of local pride—strikes me as a perfect symbol of Abdelmahmoud’s voice and style.

Across his work as a culture writer, podcaster, and essayist, he combines a big-picture hunger for our most fundamental social stories—who we are, where we come from, where we’re going—with joyful, exacting attention to the objects and artifacts of pop culture. In his debut collection, Son of Elsewhere, he brings that insight to subjects that include fantasy wrestling, country music, The O.C., the American road trip, and a big long highway that runs across southern Ontario. The book is also a poignant exploration of Blackness, Muslimness, family bonds, and what it means to try on different versions of yourself until you find the one—or the many—that fits. Earlier this month, Abdelmahmoud and I chatted about his love of pop culture, bringing his natural curiosity and enthusiasm to the page, and the complicated allure of America. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

*

Tajja Isen: You’re somebody who wears a lot of hats—you’re a culture writer, you have a podcast, you’re a political commentator, you’re on the radio. I’d love to hear how, amid all of that, the book came to be.

Elamin Abdelmahmoud: When you read it back, that is more hats than one would expect. I’ve always felt like some thoughts are for spending time with and they demand an eight-thousand-word stretch to fully grasp; some thoughts deserve a little bit more; some thoughts are just for conversation. So the book is naturally an extension of that in the sense that it’s about me, and I don’t really have a place on the internet where I write about myself. I write about culture for BuzzFeed, I talk about pop culture on a podcast, I’m a political commentator on some TV panels. But very few of those spaces contain an avenue for me to put myself into the work.

I’d walked around for a long time with the feeling of wanting to write a book. I kept on thinking about a collection of identities: my Blackness, my Muslimness, my being an immigrant. And thinking about my relationship with them when I started writing this book, because it was very different from when I first moved [to Canada]. I was twelve, and I felt an urgency to be like, Can we put these identities under a rock; can we put them under a table; can we make sure that we put the rug over them, just so nobody can see them when they come over? I spent probably a decade like that. And then I started thinking, You know what? No. These identities are owed something. They’re owed space, exploration, depths, some kind of definition of what I am in relationship to them. I’m Black—what does that mean? How can I incorporate my own idea of Blackness into that notion? This book is an attempt at apologizing to those identities [after] not [talking] about this for a decade. So that’s how it came about.

People gravitate to pop culture as a way of unlocking ourselves.

TI: You mentioned your culture writing for BuzzFeed. Obviously, Son of Elsewhere is very distinct from that. But the book also contains this incredible appetite for art and culture, this hunger to know it and map it—things like The O.C. and country music and wrestling. How, if at all, has your work as a culture writer influenced writing a memoir?

EA: I don’t know if that directly influenced it so much as it gave me a lot of permission. I work for a company that takes pop culture seriously, and I don’t take that lightly. People want to spend time with pop culture. People want to spend time with criticism about culture and thoughts about it, and the role that it plays in their lives. There’s increasingly fewer and fewer places that allow that work to flourish. And I think that gave me permission to say, “You know, what I want to get into what metal music meant to me; I want to get into wrestling in the way that has shaped how I write; I want to get into The O.C. and the ways that it gave me permission to love.” And [permission] to say, “This is a meaningful part of the tapestry of my life, it’s not something that is incidental, because these are the pop culture fragments that I’ve carried with me all these years.” Because people gravitate to pop culture as a way of unlocking ourselves.

TI: I love the way the book delights in these cultural objects and how formative they were for you. It’s a book full of big feelings. How do you think about bringing things like joy and sentimentality and enthusiasm to the page?

EA: There was this episode of Community where Abed is sort of being pushed about some of the things that he likes and why he likes them. And his answer is, “I just like liking things.” I really felt such a strong connection to that sentiment, because that’s my natural orientation. I’m not very good at hating things. I’m not very good at anger. I’m not trying to say I don’t feel those things, but I’m not very good at holding on to them. I think that a lot of my writer friends, whom I love, are really good at being in that space and turning that into creative energy—I just don’t have the muscle. This is not a flex; this is not [to] drag the people who see the world in a very different way than me. I just don’t know how to spend time in that place. I come by my enthusiasm honestly, in the sense that I don’t think I’ve ever had to think about an alternative for it. I like the world because I’m curious about it, and it allows me to feel those things fully when I’m in those moments—like, oh my god, we’re gonna spend time with a single Linkin Park lyric for twelve days, because they put it there, you know?

TI: That enthusiasm made me see things differently. It made me see the 401 [highway] differently. Honestly, I’ve always had a very contentious relationship with that road. And then I was driving it yesterday and I was [thinking about the book] like, awww.

EA: That’s great to hear. One thing that I would like the book to do is to make people appreciate the 401 a little bit more. I don’t know, man, I’ve cried a lot of tears on that highway; I’ve felt a lot of things on that highway; I’ve been conflicted a lot. I’ve reevaluated my entire life along drives on that highway. Visiting my parents, coming back and [wondering], am I a good son? I don’t take [the 401] for granted. I appreciate all the things that come with it.

TI: When did you know that you wanted that road to become a structural principle of the book?

EA: It kind of kept coming back to me. That [highway] piece was written as one piece. It shows up in the book in five different pieces, but it was written as one. It was by far the longest piece in the book, and structurally, I felt the need to not confront people with a thirteen-thousand-word essay when they open the book. Me and my editor, Jared Bland, decided that we were going to make it the thing that you keep returning to as you go throughout the book. What was your experience of those highway pieces?

TI: It was like a playlist or a concept album—the repetition of a theme that kept building as I went along. It felt deliberate and like a curated experience to me, like a journey.

EA: That’s certainly what it started to feel like as we started to separate where each of these pieces should go, because they do build up to my relationship with my parents changing and the highway playing a role in that.

TI: I want to ask you about another thing that you write about loving, which is America.

EA: Listen, I don’t feel good about it.

TI: ​​I get it. But I was, like, yelling as I read that paragraph where you write, “I’ve had to confront an annoying fact: I love America. I really do … the American open road and the feeling of finding yourself in a Great American city is itself a prayer answered.” Because I feel that pull, too. But it’s not something I see a lot of Canadian artists articulating.

EA: It’s uncomfortable to sort of feel your way around, right?

TI: Yeah, it very much is. And I wanted to ask how that uncomfortable love has shaped your work. Your career has this really interesting proximity to the U.S., and you’ve attained a level of success that not everyone who builds their career [in Canada] can reach.

EA: America continues to be confusing and confounding to me, but in a way that I think about a lot, because I love it a lot. And part of why I think me, and also lots of other Canadian artists and people working in Canada love America, is that America has a very good sense of self-narrative in a way that I think we Canadians sometimes are jealous of. Not that we don’t have one ourselves, but I think ours is a little bit looser. There’s a real sense [that] Americans seem to know what America is about, even if they’re not big fans of it, whereas a lot of Canadians have a [stronger] sense of regionalism.

So I’m a little bit jealous of how strong [the American] narrative is because I think I’m drawn to stories. And I think I’m drawn to the way that Americans tell stories about themselves, even if they’re false, because I think that’s compelling in the sense that you can gather around that story and pick it apart. The story is obviously more complicated because America bombed where I used to live. That makes the whole thing infuriating. I don’t want to like America. I don’t want to like this giant imperial power—both in the sense of physical imperialism, but also in the sense of cultural imperialism, which is what we experience here in Canada all the time. I’m not convinced that my relationship with America is not one where they’ve beaten me into liking America, you know what I mean? I don’t know if I like America, or America’s just won. Which is why that essay kind of ends on an open-ended note—I haven’t figured this out. I’m always curious about the way that this story about America keeps iterating itself in different places. But I think it’s a story that I can’t get enough of.

I write more for the internet than I do for anywhere else. And the internet audience is not the same as a book audience.

TI: I wanted to ask you about something you tweeted the other day—sorry, I know that’s an alarming way to start a question.

EA: Sometimes a ghost takes over my body and tweets.

TI: I think you were sharing Hanif Abdurraqib’s blurb for your book, and you tweeted that when you were writing, you rotated between four books, “mining them not so much for material but for permission.” I’m curious to know what the books were, and also what it means to read someone for permission—what you feel like they gave to you.

EA: The books are Hanif’s first [essay] collection, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us; Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind—I really think that’s a masterful collection. Reading Changing My Mind is one of those adventures in, like, “I didn’t know you could do that in an essay!” And the last one is Scaachi’s book [One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter]. I spent a lot of time with Scaachi’s book because Scaachi’s so funny—don’t tell her this—Scaachi’s just so funny while also being so emotionally just, oof, delivering a gut punch. I went back and forth with all these books [thinking], “Hey, you can do that? I didn’t know you could do that!” And it’s the I didn’t know you could do that that feels like permission to me. I think about, for example, Hanif’s book. Hanif is a master of the long sentence—that guy does a long sentence better than anybody else. I mean, he’s literally got pieces that are just a single sentence. I’m really grateful for those books, specifically for the way that they gave me space in terms of the things that you can do with language, the things you can do with ideas, and the ways you connect them.

TI: Is there anything else you want to share about the book that nobody has asked you yet?

EA: There’s a couple of lines in the acknowledgments—one is to my editor, who I was very grateful to for how patient he was, because boy, did we blow some deadlines—but one of the things that I thanked him for is patience to wait for the softness to come. And then the other person that I thank is my wife, at the end of the acknowledgments, for knowing where I keep my softness and helping me go back to get it. I just want to talk about that for a minute: I think I have a few different writer voices. I write more for the internet than I do for anywhere else, and the internet audience is not the same as a book audience. It’s also not the same as “book me.” I don’t know if me showing up to be like, let me do my internet writing would have served this book, or would have served the self that I wanted to be in this book. I had to frequently be a little bit softer in order to access the feelings that I wanted to put in the book. To put it bluntly, my Twitter self was not invited to the writing party. And I think what I was hoping to do with this book is to maintain that softness throughout.